snow firsts

It seems a little weird to be talking about snow today, the warmest day we have had yet in 2011.  But after all the serious talk about our son, I think it's time for a little Esther cuteness!  And much of her cuteness this winter involved snow.

We could not find a sled that we really liked in the stores we checked, but our neighbor across the street lent us one that he keeps for when his grandkids visit, and it was perfect!!  We have more than enough slope in our backyard to get going fast--in fact, we have to start at the bottom of our backyard hill or we will go too fast and crash into the hedge at the boundary of our yard!  But we had lots of fun.  On the day we borrowed the sled I was feeling nostalgic about my baby's first experience sledding...and then realized that it was my first experience sledding, too.  There just isn't much scope for that sort of thing in Thailand.  But I've discovered I like it!!!

My other personal first this winter was building a snowman.  You know, the kind you always see pictures of, where kids roll snowballs along the ground until they are huge, and then stack them.  I have tried it before, but either there wasn't enough snow or it wasn't the right consistency.  But our last big snow was perfect!  So Esther and I worked together...

...and created "Esther"!  (Guess who named her!)  Here are both Esthers posing together.  Aren't they cute??

Where we are in the process, or, alphanumeric soup

First, some really good news--our completed and approved home study is in the mail, guaranteed to arrive at our placing agency by noon on Monday!!  I don't think it will take them more than a day to send it on to the next step in the process, since they are just as aware as we are of the time constraints on this adoption.

And now, for the edification of those of you who are not veterans of international adoption: a brief tour of the process, so that when I report on our progress you'll know what I'm talking about!

The process we are going through with this adoption is different in some ways than what we did with Esther, both because she was a healthy infant as opposed to a "waiting" child, and because since our adoption of Esther, the U.S. and China have both signed onto the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.  The Hague Convention is intended to make the process of international adoption more ethical and transparent, and to combat child trafficking.  It is, I think, a step in a very good direction.  But for adoptive parents it has added several additional layers of paperwork to the international adoption process, which was already complex.  There are a couple of steps that I'm still a little unclear on, not having done them before.  But, here goes: the process of adopting a "waiting" child from China under the Hague Convention!

Step 1:  Identifying an agency or waiting child

Some people first decide that they are going to adopt, then decide which international adoption agency they would like to work with, and then start thinking about what kind of child they hope to be matched with.  People in this first category might go all the way through Step 5 (LID) before being matched with a child. Others, like us, "find" their son- or daughter-to-be on an agency list first, and go with whatever agency is listing "their" child.  Lucky for us, our son was listed with WACAP (World Association for Children and Parents), a large, reputable agency with lots of experience in many different kinds of adoptions, including adoptions from China.  Their expertise has been very helpful to us already, and it makes us feel better about our tight timeline knowing that they have successfully shepherded other adoptive parents through some even tighter timelines.  Plus, we feel confident that they have experience with all kinds of issues that adoptive families can have and would be able and willing to talk us through a crisis if we were to have one.

Step 2:  Pre-approval (PA)

(This could happen anywhere in the first five steps, but for us it was our second step, because we already knew which child we wanted to adopt.)  For this step, we had to send certain documents to China, such as a financial statement, medical forms that we filled out ourselves (not unlike the ones you fill out when seeing a new doctor for the first time, though not quite as long), and a letter describing how we intended to accommodate our hoped-for child's medical condition.  WACAP also required us to fill out a great long document called a "Parenting Resource Plan" before they would submit our PA paperwork to China--this was an agency requirement, not China's requirement.  This document asked us how we would handle pretty much any situation that might come up in an adoption, and I ended up writing twenty-plus pages to answer all the questions!  Once our Parenting Resource Plan was completed and all our other documents had been duly mailed to WACAP, they submitted our request to the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) for pre-approval to adopt this particular child.  The CCAA reviewed our documents, decided that we seemed to meet all the requirements based on that information, and granted us pre-approval.  The process was supposed to take six weeks, but we got our PA in two!  This was the point at which our son's profile disappeared off of WACAP's "waiting children" page, and the adoption suddenly felt a lot more real!
 
Step 3:  home study

The home study is a comprehensive document, prepared by a licensed social worker, which describes the prospective adoptive family and their circumstances in detail, and in the end states whether or not they are recommended as adoptive parents at this time, and what sort of child(ren) (age, gender, level of special needs, etc.) they are recommended for.  We are recommended for one or two children (with the understanding that two children should be siblings), male or female, 0-13 years of age, with mild or moderate medical special needs.  Our home study took FOUR MONTHS to finish!  And neither we nor our social worker was slacking.  But, WACAP is not licensed to perform home studies in our state, so we had to find another agency to do our study.  And while we love the agency we are working with locally and are very excited to know that they will be a resource to us in our post-adoption phase, they specialize in working with children in U.S. foster care, and their policy is that all adoptive parents must become licensed foster parents in this state in order to have an approved home study.  So, we took hours upon hours of classes--foster parent training classes, a crisis de-escalation class, a first aid and CPR class--and met various other requirements that most international adoptive parents don't have to meet.  There was one week that I was so stressed out about it all (or rather, about trying to do it all quickly) that I caught myself daydreaming that our son's foster parents had come forward and asked to adopt him (which would no doubt be a wonderful thing for him if it really happened, but I think if it was going to happen it would have before now), and we were off the hook.  But the home study did eventually get finished, and as of today, we are not only approved as international prospective adoptive parents, but as a local foster care family.  And while we won't be in a position to do long-term foster care anytime soon, it does mean that we, unlike most people, can legally babysit children who are in foster care.  We actually know a couple of families in our area who are doing foster care, so that may come in handy!

Step 4:  Immigration pre-approval (I-800A)

This is the next step for us.  The immigration process can't be started until a family has an approved home study.  Our home study, an application, and a very large fee will soon be going to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).  They will check to make sure that we are eligible to bring a newly adopted child into the United States as a family member.  As part of that process, we will have to get our fingerprints made and have an FBI search done on them.  Again.  I have never understood why they can't use the results of the FBI check that we just did for our home study.  I guess that would just make too much sense for a bureaucracy.  Anyway, in a few weeks we will get a letter giving us an appointment date and time to go get our fingerprints taken.  We can (and will) go to the designated place early and try to talk them into doing us as a walk-in so that we can get through this phase as quickly as possible.  On the bright side, they scan prints into machines that tell you immediately whether or not the print is good enough quality and make you do it over until it is satisfactory, so my prints won't be rejected this time.  Once our prints have cleared, we should receive an I-797C notice, which approves us in general to bring an adopted child from another country into the U.S. as a family member, thus giving them U.S. citizenship.  The whole process takes around two months.  If there are complications, it could take much longer.  (But that is unlikely with our application, which is very straightforward.)  If we do our fingerprints early, it could be shorter.  We're hoping for shorter!

Step 4:  Dossier

Our dossier is the official packet of documents that we send to China for review prior to them declaring us eligible to adopt.  It includes our home study, medical forms filled out by a doctor, birth certificates, marriage certificate, police clearances, a financial statement, letters of employment, and things like that.  Most of these forms have to be notarized, then sent to the Secretary of State of the state in which they were signed to have the notary's signature verified, then sent the the Chinese consulate with jurisdiction over that state to have the Secretary of State's signature authenticated.  Then we send the notarized/verified/authenticated documents to WACAP to be translated into Chinese.  We are already moving right along on this process, and expect to have most of our documents done in a few weeks.  The last thing we need before the dossier can go to China is our I-797C notice (see Step 3 above).  Then the dossier can be sent to China (giving us a DTC, "Date To China); logged in to the CCAA's system (giving us an LID, "Log-In Date"); and eventually read and approved by the staff of the CCAA.   We expect that they will expedite us somewhat due to our son's age.  I think this part of the process normally takes around six weeks, but I'm not sure.  Once the CCAA has read and approved our dossier, they will generate a Letter of Acceptance (LOA) giving us official approval to adopt from China.  (Since we already have PA, it is possible that our LOA will actually be called an LOC, Letter of Confirmation.  Our agency has used that term, but I'm a little fuzzy on where it fits in the big picture!)  I think that this is the point at which we are officially allowed to contact our son and start sending him letters, pictures, and care packages.  We are also very hopeful that his orphanage will let us talk to him over skype.

Step 5:  I-800 and Article 5

Once we have our final approval from China, we go back to the USCIS and file form I-800, letting them know which particular child we have been matched with.  This is the part where I get fuzzy on who does what when, but the purpose of this step is for the U.S. to investigate this child's background and make sure that he is a true orphan by international standards and thus eligible for immigration as an adopted child.  I think there are some sub-steps, to wit: the USCIS generates a provisional approval and cables it to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, which makes a further investigation and generates an Article 5, which gives us approval from the U.S. to adopt this specific child and bring him into the country.

Step 6:  Travel Approval (TA)

Now we get to go back to the CCAA and inform them that we have been cleared by the U.S. to immigrate with our child.  Upon receiving this information, the CCAA will issue us a document (Notice of Traveling to China, also called TA) that we can present to the Civil Affairs office on adoption day showing that we have permission to adopt this child.  At the same time, they will notify the Civil Affairs office in the child's province that we are going to be coming to adopt the child.

Step 7:  Consulate Appointment (CA)

Before we can leave China with our newly adopted child, he will need to go through a medical examination and some immigration paperwork at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou.  So, unless we are able to be very flexible about the length of our trip to China, we need to know what date we will be appearing at the Consulate before we get our plane tickets.  Generally families are able to get more-or-less the date they request, and it only takes a day or so to get it settled.

Step 8:  travel arrangements

No alphabet soup here, just setting a date with the child's orphanage and Civil Affairs office for us to take custody of the child and go through the formalities of adoption, and then buying plane tickets and booking hotel rooms.  Last time we did all this by ourselves, but this time our agency will do much of it for us.

According to the current laws of the People's Republic of China, children who are fourteen or older cannot be adopted.  Our son's 14th birthday in on June 20.  So, we have to have all these steps completed and be in his province before June 20th.  (The consulate part of the process can be done after his birthday; U.S. law allows children to be adopted and brought in up through age sixteen.)  With all the steps we have yet to go through, I don't see much chance of us traveling before June.  So, unlike most adoptive parents, we don't have the stress of wondering when we are going to travel to meet our child--just the stress of wondering how we're going to get everything done before our deadline!  However, we both feel a lot better now that our home study is finished.  We are now done with most of the grinding paperwork, and what we have ahead of us is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait as we let the agencies of two governments do their thing.

THANK YOU!

Thank you to anyone and everyone who has been praying for my fingerprints to clear!  I just got off the phone with CJIS--didn't know if I was even allowed to ask about the status of my prints yet, but thought the fact that this is a re-submission was a good enough excuse to try--and I was told that they have just been processed and the results will be in the mail tomorrow!  This is my second try and I sent in two fingerprint cards instead of one, so I don't think they will ask for another re-do.  At least, three sets of fingerprint cards is the number I went through with Esther's adoption (I think they finally gave up and did a name check).  I have been praying hard that this would be the week our last two clearances came in so we could get our home study approved and start on the next step of this adoption process.  The other clearance we're waiting on should arrive at the end of this week, thanks to a very kind and efficient woman at Ohio's department of Child and Family Services who, when she found out why I needed the clearance, offered to pull it out of the queue and have it processed right away.  So with these fingerprints done too, we might actually be able to meet our "drop-dead date" for the home study!!

I'll try to write another entry soon to explain what the above means, as some of it won't make sense if you've never done an international adoption.  But trust me, this is very, very good news and I wanted to share my happiness!

telling Esther

When we first found out about our son, we did a lot of talking over Esther's head as we tried to figure out at each step whether we should keep moving forward and what questions we needed to ask next.  But as we got closer to the end of the second week and started thinking we were likely to say yes, we broached the topic with Esther.  We told her that we had heard about a boy in China who lived in an orphanage with ayis (nannies) and lots of other kids, just like she did when she was a baby.  Only he hadn't gotten adopted when he was a baby, so he still lived there, but he really wanted a family.  We asked Esther to pray with us that a family would adopt him.  We could tell from the way she listened and responded that she sympathized with his situation, and she wanted him to have a family.

So when we decided for sure that we were going to adopt FH, our conversation with Esther went something like this:

Mommy:  Hey Esther, you know FH, who we were praying about yesterday?  Well, we think that maybe we would be the right family to adopt him.
Esther:  You can't adopt FH, you already adopted me!
Mommy:  Yes, we already adopted you, and you are part of our family forever.  But we think we could adopt two children into the family.
Esther (her face lighting up):  If we adopt two children, then we could go to...what it called?
Mommy:  China?
Esther:  No...Lowe's!  And we could both ride in the up shopping car cart!  (Lowe's has some special shopping carts with seats for two children.  Esther thinks it's a real treat to ride in one.)
Mommy:  I'm afraid FH is too tall to ride in a shopping cart.  He would look pretty funny!
Esther:  Maybe we can adopt a small child, and then we can both ride in a shopping car cart!

Later she said, "Mommy,  I don't like FH very much."  (I don't remember exactly how I responded to that, but I told her something along the lines of that was okay, it would take us some time to all get used to each other and we didn't know whether or not we would like each other at first.)

I think Esther felt (and reasonably so!) a little unsettled at first about the prospect of another child joining our family.  But gradually as the idea became less new and as she realized that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, she got more comfortable.  Here is a conversation we had on December 16:

Esther (very seriously):  FH needs a family.
Mommy:  Yes, he lives in an orphanage like you did when you were a baby, but he didn't get a family when...
Esther (joyfully):  We're FH's family!
Mommy:  That's right!  But he doesn't know that yet.  Later he'll find out about us, and then we'll go to China to meet him!
Esther:  And I'll say, "FH!"
Mommy:  What will you say to him?
Esther (after some thought):  I don't know.

When we visited some friends in the DC area at the beginning of January, Esther was quite happy to show off our video of him and to tell everyone, "That's my brother.  He sings in Chinese."  (I've tried to explain to her that he speaks Chinese too, but I don't think she quite gets that they won't be able to understand each other's words when they first meet.  Nor, for that matter, have I succeeded in convincing her that he can't fit in a shopping cart.)

Esther's life has already been somewhat impacted by this adoption.  She spent a lot of hours with babysitters while we took classes required by our home study agency, and watched extra videos while Mommy was busy with "paperwork."  One whole day she went around the house murmuring "Dossy-A" to herself at random intervals (dossier being the set of information about our family that we have to send to China before they can give final approval to our adoption).  We consulted her about turning her playroom into her new brother's bedroom, giving him the tall bed in there (which we had originally bought for her), and moving her toys elsewhere, and she decided that would be okay.  She also decided she does NOT want her own "big bed" yet, so since we don't want to move her anywhere close in time to the adoption, she is going to stay in her crib in our room at least till next Christmas.  I think she has enough inches left that she won't run out of room before then!

Recently she has been talking about FH almost every day.  When she had to fill out a little booklet about her thoughts and feelings as part of our home study process, she included FH as a family member on the family page, and put "I want to adopt FH" as one of the two things that she would want a new family member to know.  (I would tell you the other, but I can't find our photocopy right now...it might have been that she can draw squiggly lines.  I know that made it in there somewhere.)  So at least the idea of him has been accepted.  It remains to be seen what she thinks of the real thing!

The Plan. Revised. Part V.

[So, we had learned of a boy in China who was in need of a family, and would soon be too old to be legally adopted.  We had discovered that, contrary to our expectations about time frame, China's requirements, and our finances, we could realistically adopt him.  We had thought, and prayed, and been encouraged by an unexpected encounter with the adoptive parents of a little girl from China with the same special need as the boy we were considering.  And we had watched video footage of him that gave us more of a mental picture of him, but also raised some new questions.]

By now it was a week after we had gotten the initial e-mail from this boy's U.S. adoption agency saying that it would probably be possible for us to adopt the child we had inquired about.  On Monday, we got busy with our second round of questions.  I joined yahoo groups, hoping to learn from their members, and sent off e-mails to various people asking various questions.  One of the e-mails went to our Family Finder at the agency to ask if we could find out more about this child's foster family.  I was told that China does not encourage contact between adoptive and foster families, and that it was unlikely that we could find out any more about them unless he told us himself after being adopted by us.  So, no help there.  I also sent an e-mail to the woman who had originally written the e-mail we had first seen about this boy, asking if I could talk to her about him, and if anyone else had contacted her to find out more about him.  We were the only ones who had contacted her, and she was happy to talk to me over the phone between such-and-such hours.

So Monday night I called and talked to this boy's advocate.  I was a little disappointed to find out that her child had been adopted at age two, and so she couldn't answer many of my questions as to what life in the SWI was like for older children.  But she was able to tell me a little bit more about her meeting with the director of the SWI, and how the director had seemed to care so much for this boy, and wanted so badly for him to have a family.  She also agreed to post my questions to the yahoo group for this SWI, so that any parents who had adopted older children from there could answer my questions if they were willing.

A couple of people e-mailed me detailed responses, and one woman sent me an invitation to call her.  Some of what was shared I won't go into here because it was personal.  But I learned some things that helped me get a feel for what it might be like to grow up in that environment:

--The staff generally do care about the children and try to do right by them.  But of course, there is only so much adult attention to go around, and sometimes bigger kids are mean to smaller ones.  Several parents shared the types of discipline (punishment) their children had experienced, although they weren't sure if it was an orphanage-wide policy or if discipline is nanny-specific.
--Some (but not all) of the older children attend school in the community.  The boy we were considering appears to be one of them.  They walk back and forth each day.  At least one child experienced severe bullying at the community school.
--The orphanage encourages families from the community to take children home for weekends or holidays.  At the designated time, children are brought into the lobby and pre-screened families are invited to pick out which child they will take home for a visit.  The mother who told me this said that on the one hand, it gives kids good manners and experience with family life.  On the other hand, it can lead them to be over-pleasers in order to be chosen.
--The kids in the traveling choir (which our boy was in) have had lots of experiences in the wider world, so are not as sheltered as is typical of orphans.
--Of all the families that one mother was aware of that have adopted older children from this orphanage, only one has experienced significant behavioral problems.  That's not to say their kids don't have issues relating to having spent their growing-up years in an institution, but they have tended to settle into their families well.
--In this orphanage, kids who don't get adopted go to work in a factory or go to trade school at about age 16.
--Kids who do get adopted are allowed to continue contact with their friends at the orphanage.

The things I learned about the SWI were not 100% as I had hoped, but by and large painted a picture of a stable environment where children could give some attention to growing up and not just survival.  In any case, there were no serious red flags.  One of the parents ended her e-mail with: "I will leave you with this....from my experience there are more good reasons to say yes than reasons to say no."

The last big, unsettled question in our minds was what would be the costs for this boy of leaving the relationships and competencies he has in China in order to be adopted, vs. the costs of staying there and living with discrimination and without permanent legal connections to anyone.  That question was the one we couldn't answer.  We knew he would face significant discrimination and lack of opportunities if he stayed in China...but he seemed to have a talent for acquiring advocates, and if his director was willing to go to bat for him in adulthood as strongly as she had in trying to get him adopted, he might well do better than many young men in his position.  It sounded like he had a significant relationship with his foster family...but they presumably were unable or unwilling to adopt him, since they had not done so, and there was no way of knowing whether the relationship would be permanent, like the one we would have with him if we adopted him.  There are some very vocal (and eloquent) adult international adoptees who feel that taking a child away from their language and culture and birth country relationships is just too damaging...but this child was old enough that, while he would never again feel at home in China in the same way that he does now, he would certainly maintain language, relationships, and cultural competency even if he spent the next ten years as part of our family in the U.S.

In the end (I think on Thursday night) we discussed everything that we had learned and reached a few conclusions.

1.  There were way more unknowns than we liked about this boy's situation in China, and the likely outcomes if we didn't adopt him, but his SWI director did know his situation and how his life might turn out, and she clearly felt very strongly that being adopted was in his best interest.  Furthermore, it sounded like he himself had wanted very badly to be adopted, even by a foreign family, at the time he was first listed, and we guessed that he had been asked again and said yes again before he participated in the Journey of Hope event (where the video footage was taken), after he was already living in his foster family.
2.  While we still hadn't heard any voice speaking from heaven, the information we needed and the answers to our questions had been falling into place in ways that felt more than accidental.  We had done our best to consider every angle and to track down every piece of data that might help us make a responsible decision, and after all that process, we were not left with any reason to say no.  Lots of unknowns, yes, but we knew more things than many parents in our position were able to find out, and all of what we knew was pointing in the same direction.

Meanwhile, time was moving on, and the deadline for this boy's adoption (his 14th birthday) was not negotiable.  So we took a deep breath and decided to move forward, on the theory that the way things were coming together was the answer to our prayers for guidance.  By Friday of that week I was filling out the application form for this boy's U.S. agency, and making arrangements with an agency in our state to do our homestudy.


A few days later, I wrote to a friend:  "We are moving forward with [the adoption] process--with some trepidation!--but we have been praying and paying attention, and it seems that all of our concerns are being answered one by one.  At least, those for which an answer is possible."

The Plan. Revised. Part IV.

I'm finally getting back to this series!  This time I had to go back and re-read my previous entries myself in order to remember where in the story I was!  To recap: We had been thinking of adding to our family again when we learned about an aging-out boy in China whom we could realistically adopt.  It was a scary step to contemplate actually taking, but as we sought more information during a week of thinking about it, we were generally encouraged.

On Saturday of that week, we had an event that I had been really looking forward to: a gathering of families with children from China!  This was an answer to prayer in and of itself, because when we moved here we really hadn't known whether there were other families in the area with children adopted from China, and if so, how to connect with them.  But one day Tim got a message on his work phone from a fellow adoptive mother of a Chinese child.  She had heard through the grapevine that there was a new professor at Tim's college who had a child from China, and she wanted so much to connect with us that she started calling through the list of departments trying to track him down!  Her family knew or knew of several other families with children from China, and she was planning a lunch for us to all meet and get to know each other.  Of course, we were thrilled at the prospect.  So that Saturday we duly set out to gather with five other families with children from China (and one Chinese woman who works at Tim's university, whom the organizer had connected with while trying to track down Tim).  We walked into the room, we said hi to people, another family walked in behind us...and wouldn't you know it, their little girl has the exact same special need as the boy whose file we were looking at.  Mind you, this is not a common special need.  So as soon as I got a minute to whisper to Tim without anyone else hearing me, I asked, "Do we tell them??"  (We hadn't planning on telling anyone at this gathering that we were thinking of adopting again, seeing as it was by no means a sure thing.)  Tim agreed with me that we should tell them, so we managed to sit with them at lunch and talked about this disability.  One of the first things they said was, "This is one of the best places in the country to live if your child has this condition!  There is a nationally-known specialist, and lots of resources, and they're free to state residents!"  I mean, really?  This is not a part of the country that is known for being cutting-edge.  But apparently, it "just so happens" to have all the resources we could want for this particular child's medical needs.  AND the resources are affordable to us.  Another of our major questions had been whether we had the financial ability to adequately manage this child's condition after we adopted him.  Well, one more question checked off the list.  Later in the afternoon, as all the little girls except Esther were coloring quietly on the floor, I watched Esther playing chase with Tim's Chinese colleague's ten-year-old son and shrieking with laughter, and I allowed myself to imagine her doing the same with her big brother.

When we got home, we had more excitement: in our mailbox was an envelope with a CD from the adoption agency, which had lots more pictures of this child, and even a video!  After putting Esther down for her nap, Tim and I watched raptly.  We had already read in his file many of the things that we saw on the video, but we got to see for ourselves how he functions with his disability, and heard with our own ears that he does, indeed, have a beautiful singing voice (one of the things we had read about him).  There was one surprise: a nanny said that he had been living with a foster family for the previous six months, and was still with them!  This orphanage does not, as far as I know, have any organized foster care program, so we took it to mean that someone who had met him had been so impressed with him that they had gotten permission for him to live with them.  On the one hand, that suggested that he was the kind of kid who could adjust well to a family.  On the other hand, it raised all kinds of questions.  What was his relationship with this family?  How traumatic would it be for him to be separated from them?  Was it possible that they would be able to adopt him, or willing to be permanently "in his corner," if he was not listed for international adoption?

So we continued thinking...and praying...and widening the circle of people that we were asking to pray for us.  We talked about our situation with a few people at church on Sunday.  Ironically, someone that we had not yet told remarked to someone else in my presence that her cousin had just gotten home from China after adopting a five-year-old with...yep, that same medical condition that the child we were considering had.  Interesting.

Chunjie Kuaile!

Or, Happy Spring Festival!  Today ushered in the Year of the Rabbit, and we celebrated with gusto.  When I realized that Spring Festival was going to be a daycare day for Esther, I briefly thought about keeping her home. It just didn't seem in keeping with the spirit of the festival, which is very much about family togetherness, to send her away from me for the morning.  Then I thought about how she is always asking me to come in to daycare with her, and I had the bright idea of asking if I could come in and do a lesson on Chinese New Year with Esther's class.  Her teachers were enthused about the idea, so I duly prepared a lesson and all three of us went in to the university together this morning.  Esther was disappointed when I left her eating breakfast and went downstairs to get my craft materials prepped, but when her class came down later she was thrilled to have me as her teacher.  I talked a little bit about what the children would be doing to celebrate if they were in China, showed the Nihao Kailan Chinese New Year episode, helped them make a dragon craft which turned out really cool, let them dance their dragons around to Chinese music, and then figured out what zodiac animal each child is (they were all dogs or pigs).  The kids didn't seem particularly interested in the animal part, but Esther really latched onto that this year and informed several people proudly this afternoon that she is a pig.  Oh, she also wore a rabbit shirt (conveniently given to her for Christmas by her Aunt Susie) in honor of the year of the rabbit, as well as a festive New Year jacket that she took off after about a minute and a half because "it's making me sweaty."  I brought a camera to the daycare, but was too occupied to take any pictures.

In the afternoon we made rabbit cookies, decorated them, and took plates of them over to our nearest neighbors to wish them a happy Chinese New Year.  I did get pictures of this part of the day!

My initial idea was to ice the rabbits with white icing and put on Smarties for eyes, nose, and mouth.  It was something Esther could do and have fun doing, and it was very cute.  But smarties and Indian spices, I discovered, taste nasty together.  (Good thing we taste-tested!)  

So I ended up parking Esther in front of a video while I carefully drew features on each bunny with icing.  Not exactly the family bonding activity I had in mind, but they did look darling.  Then we took them around to our neighbors, staying and chatting with several of them.  Cookies are not a traditional Spring Festival item, but actually, going round to give our neighbors good wishes and special food felt very appropriate, and was certainly fun.  We haven't been seeing as much of our neighbors since it's been cold and snowy, and it was nice to catch up.

We finished up our special day with a feast!  Well, it wasn't a real feast.  There were only three dishes (not counting the cookies), and two of them came to the table in their frying pans.  But we had jiaozi (dumplings), which are always a treat for us, especially since we rarely have them now that Tim is avoiding wheat.  Esther, in fact, got so excited about the fact that we were going to have dumplings that I'm thinking I should buy some to make when it's just her and me at home.  Here is a picture of our inelegant "feast," with Tim and Esther giving each other rabbit ears.

I hope you all have a happy and meaningful Year of the Rabbit!